Social media is turning into your dad

Do you remember when you knew everything in your glorious teenage years? Do you remember how you despaired of your parents and then as the years passed (you mightn’t be there yet) you started to turn into your parents? 🙂

Aside: My 5 (nearly 6) year old already refers to me as his “old man” – it’s very depressing.

Well I think social media has passed through the teenage years and is now getting a little flabby.

Let me explain.

When “social media” first appeared (before it was called social media) it was all about the conversation, it was about connecting with people and it was about authentic communication. That last one was my personal favorite. We were going to move away from corporate-speak and instead write for people. I love this.

However, the emergence of all our beloved social media gurus has stymied our progress.

You see there’s a lot of blog posts to write, a lot of tweets to tweet and let’s be honest limited content. You can only talk about conversations, connections and authenticity so many times before you become repetitive or worse bore yourself.

So what do you do?

Well you do what marketers have done since the 1950s. You invent all these silly little words that mean nothing and you also overuse superlatives.

In effect, our social media gurus have left the world of plain speaking and morphed into the same old habits they decried five years ago.

I read a post this morning from a very fine man, who does a fantastic job evangelizing the importance of social media and after reading it three times I still couldn’t quite believe or understand what he was writing:

attention economy

social objects

human network

social exchange

What a load of rubbish (or trash).

Stay away from the light social media gurus. Turn back. Remember the old days (oh 3-4 years ago) when you railed against corporate-speak. Turn back. Rediscover your roots.

Stop inventing silly words and trying to add science where it does not belong.